Speaker Ryan Squeezes More H-2B Workers From DHS Chief John Kelly

Homeland defense secretary John Kelly will likely announce today a plan to print thousands of additional H-2B visas for foreign blue-collar workers, according to D.C. sources.

“We should have an announcement on Monday,” agency spokesman David Lapan told Breitbart News.

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Kelly will approve an additional 15,000 H-2B visa workers for 2017, bumping up the nationwide total to roughly 130,000 workers, another source told Breitbart. The decision is “a betrayal of [President Donald] Trump’s campaign promise to deliver blue-collar jobs to Americans,” the source said.

The turnabout by Kelly marks a win for the GOP legislators and allied business groups who oppose President Donald Trump’s popular “Buy American, Hire American” policy.

The additional inflow of foreign workers will reduce marketplace pressure on employers to develop labor-saving technology and to streamline their business practices. The extra outsourcing visas will also reduce the pressure on companies to offer marketplace wages to recruit new employees, will reduce their incentive to train unemployed Americans from rural and urban areas, and reduce their incentive to lobby state legislators for more vocational training programs.

Kelly’s closed-door decision does not allow for a full regulatory process, which would normally allow the public to provide comments against an expansion of the cheap-labor program.

The “lack of comment period is due to lateness of the legislation (May), [the] requirement to consult with [the Department of] Labor and [the] requirement to follow the law on federal rule making in order to provide additional seasonal worker visas before we get deeper into the summer season,” said Lapan.

The program already delivers roughly 115,000 as foreign seasonal workers to Americans companies each year, mostly in the South and East. Many H-2B workers also work at winter resorts in Colorado.

The program allows companies to bring in 66,000 new workers each year — and also to keep workers who got visas in the prior two years. The rules allow companies to maintain a workforce of roughly 115,000 H-2B workers in the United States, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute.

Just like the white-collar H-1B visa program, the H-2B program is unpopular with the public, but lobbyists constantly pressure legislators to increase the annual inflow of foreign workers.

Politicians know the program is very unpopular. In December 2015, House Speaker Paul Ryan inserted a difficult-to-read passage into the annual spending bill that greatly expanded the program. After the November 2016 election, however, House Speaker Paul Ryan reversed the expansion.

In May, however, Ryan and other legislators again expanded the H-2B program while hiding their plan from voters. They passed the buck to Kelly by adding language in the May budget supplemental which allows the DHS secretary to expand the H-2B program by up to 70,000 new workers each year. Lobbyists then pressured Kelly — and the legislators who control the DHS budget — to quickly expand the program via low-profile regulatory changes so that foreign workers can be hired and rushed into jobs later this summer, fall and winter.

The wage-cutting plan was covered by Breitbart but was largely ignored by the establishment media.

In May, Kelly initially said he would reluctantly approve some extra workers, but then quickly backtracked. “I know we already have large numbers [of contract workers] that come in and have been coming in over the years, but … in the current administration, this is all about American jobs versus people that come in and do the work,” Kelly told Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in early June.

Then Kelly agreed to increase the visa numbers as he came under increased pressure from lobbyists and GOP and Democratic legislators, led by GOP Sen. Thom Tillis.

Spokesman Lapan complained about the pressure, saying Kelly “is concerned that Congress is passing the buck by not clearly legislating the H2B visa numbers, and expects that this one-time occurrence is an anomaly.”

Kellly’s approval of the extra H-2B visas will likely encourage the GOP legislators and companies to seek even more H-2B in future years.

Here is Kelly’s May statement to the appropriations committee:

This is one of things I really wish I did not have any discretion, and for every Senator or Congressman that has your view, I have another one that says ‘Don’t you dare, this is about American jobs.’ You know the argument, both sides. My staff, members of my staff, are coordinating with the Department of Labor on this. One of the things, and I have my working class root background that keeps reminding me that some of these individuals —not necessarily in Alaska — but many, many of these individuals are victimized when they come up here, in terms of what they’re paid and all the rest of it, so we’re working with Labor, Department of Labor, to come up with an answer to this, but we really do need a long-term solution, so we’ll work with the Senate and with Congress, within the industry, this year, and again, I’ll have my staff when they return from Labor and we get some protocols in place, we’ll likely increase the numbers for this year, perhaps not by the entire number that I’m authorized, but we really do need, I’m really looking forward to working with you Senator, and the whole Congress, to get a longer-term solution to this.